Atlantis Previews Portable & Persistent Containers with Rancher Labs!

Patrick Brennan - Atlantis

As containers continue to be explored and IT is being challenged to cloud enable their applications, organizations are finding new and exciting ways to use them to solve challenges in the enterprise that traditional virtualization architecture has struggled to fulfil. Containers were originally conceptualized under the context of being ephemeral, voiding any requirements for architecting infrastructure for persistence. However, as organizations found ways to apply the benefits of containers to a variety of other workloads and in some cases production, persistence suddenly became a challenge that needed to be solved. Like most technology, when containers began being used for a different purpose than its original intent, a new set of challenges and problems emerged.

When we first began looking at containers, it became evident that the container architecture is quite symmetrical to how a non-persistent virtual desktop solution is constructed. While the desktop workload itself may be non-persistent, having access to and the ability to save persistent data is pivotal to supporting VDI. This requirement is also beginning to take shape with containers as it matures to supporting and delivering persistent type workloads. Delivering persistent storage isn’t as simple as just presenting a data store that is non-volatile. When you add the requirement of persistence an entire new set of challenges associated with delivering persistent storage emerge, such as making sure it’s protected and resilient while also providing enough performance and capacity. As container adoption continues to grow and the workloads get more sophisticated, these demands on infrastructure and storage will only increase with the requirement to deliver them on-prem or in the cloud.

Atlantis eliminates data service problems for containers

Fortunately, these upcoming challenges for containers have already been solved. With our proven history of delivering solutions for these scenarios, we have already been able to eliminate the issues that containers would have otherwise experienced. As we recently announced our workspace stack and the benefits of integrating USX with Citrix for a simplified and unified platform, we partnered with Rancher Labs to deliver a unified stack for containers as well.

By combining Rancher and Atlantis, the infrastructure and management becomes a unified platform that is able to orchestrate and deliver purpose built application defined storage for docker containers. Further, simplifying this into a single platform enables organizations to scale and manage seamlessly on-demand on any infrastructure on-prem or in the cloud. With Atlantis providing mature enterprise data services, customers can deliver portable applications anywhere that are resilient and protected with sophisticated features such as teleport, snapshots, replication, etc. Atlantis also has a variety of unique volume types that when orchestrated by Rancher, allow for on-demand or scheduled instant provisioning with optimal placement of containers to ensure the fastest level of performance with greater capacity. Overall, this solution will finally give IT organizations the ability to deliver cloud enabled applications that are agile and can scale with confidence. Be sure to check out the blog from Rancher Labs on this topic

On October 25th, we announced the upcoming availability of the USX Community Edition with a preview of the container stack. This tech preview will allow the Atlantis community to have some fun with containers and take a deeper look into the technology and the integrations we’re working on with Rancher, which I encourage you to download. Also, don’t forget to register for the webinarto learn more about what we’re doing with containers.